WE ALL HAVE GOOD habits and bad habits. One of my best habits: bringing my lunch to work.
I save both money and calories by brown-bagging it rather than buying lunch at a restaurant. My lunch of leftovers, along with a few pieces of fruit and a bottle of water, cost less than even a fast-food meal deal, and it’s healthier. What about the long-term savings from avoiding those additional calories? Researchers have found that excess body weight adds thousands of dollars to our annual health care expenses.

I RECENTLY LEFT A BID for a set of old, dusty chairs at a country auction. The next morning when I called the auctioneer, he told me I was the high bidder and the chairs’ new owner. As an economist, I immediately thought, “Wait—am I the winner or the loser here?”
The auction was held at the Elks Lodge in Rockland, Maine, where old furniture tends to go for a song. I had been drawn there by a picture of six Chippendale dining chairs supposedly made in Philadelphia in the 18th century.

PHYSICAL THERAPY IS a teaching profession. I am the teacher and my patients are the students. They come to me with a problem in need of a solution. I help them find the answer.
Most of my patients have never faced the daunting challenge of overcoming a physical disability caused by injury or disease. They don’t know where to begin. Many have also never put in the sustained effort needed to achieve a tough goal.

EARLY IN MY CAREER, I pursued a rigorous financial industry certification. Among the hoops I had to jump through: passing a seven-hour exam.
For 18 months, I woke up every day before work and studied for an hour. I found that consistency far more helpful than eight-hour weekend study sessions. Thanks to my daily commitment through the workweek, I only had to study for one to three hours each Saturday and Sunday.
Still, I didn’t want to get up most mornings.

I ENJOY PLAYING GOLF with friends and colleagues, but my game never seems to improve. Like many, I’m busy with my career and other activities, so I don’t make it a point to practice and, when I do, it’s rarely with an instructor.
Instead, when I head to the driving range to hit balls, it’s without a clear notion of what aspect of my game I’m going to concentrate on. It’s a trial-and-error process that’s modestly helpful at best.

TO MEASURE IS TO improve. Businesses, investors, athletes and others embrace this notion, and it undoubtedly has value. Still, earlier this year, when my bicycle’s decade-old computer—which measured speed, distance and cadence—finally quit on me, I didn’t replace it.
These days, when I go out for my morning 20-mile bike ride, I like to think I’m going reasonably fast and I’m not happy if another cyclist passes me. But I also know that, when I occasionally use the Strava app on my phone to clock my average speed,

THE ENGLISH POET Alfred Tennyson wrote that it is “better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all.” When it comes to matters of the heart, maybe Tennyson was right. But when it comes to personal finance, I’m not sure that’s the case. If you’ve ever seen a gain slip through your fingers, you know the feeling of regret can be powerful.
Two conversations last week prompted me to take a closer look at this topic.

IN THE WEEKS BEFORE my annual physical, I made a concerted effort to lose a few pounds, drink more water, skip my evening glass of wine, eat more fiber, and avoid red meat, French fries and cheese. The happy result: My blood pressure was low. My weight was down slightly from my previous checkup. My cholesterol count was good. My A1C level suggests my prediabetic condition hasn’t got any worse. All in all, last month’s physical found that I had little reason to worry.

MEET THE LATEST feature added to HumbleDollar—as well as the website’s first calculator: the Two-Minute Checkup.
How does it work? All you need to do is input up to nine pieces of information, the sort of stuff most of us know off the top of our head. There’s no need to create an account or link to your brokerage firm or bank, and none of your information is saved on HumbleDollar or anywhere else. 

IF WE GO TO THE movies and buy a mega-tub of popcorn, we’ll eat a lot, probably too much. If, however, that same amount of popcorn is packaged into four bags, we won’t eat nearly so much.
Why? With the four bags, we keep arriving at a decision point—that moment when we have to ponder whether it’s worth opening a new bag. This is the insight of behavioral economist Dilip Soman of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management,

I RECENTLY CHATTED with a clerk at an art supply store. We both complained about the Texas heat. Whenever I engage in small talk or meet new people, the weather is my safe, go-to topic. As the saying goes, “Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it.”
Changes in the weather affect us to varying degrees—pun intended. Some effects are minor, like rain interrupting our outdoor plans. Others are more serious.

ALMOST SEVEN MONTHS on, I’ve failed miserably with one of the New Year’s resolutions I wrote about for HumbleDollar—but I’ve done well with the other.
I’d like to take credit for my success in not obsessively checking my IRA, but the discouraging reality of the financial markets has a lot to do with it. This year, going online to view my account several times a day—which I’ve been known to do—would have left me feeling truly hopeless.

I WAS EDITING a fellow graduate student’s paper. She’s in her mid-20s, less than half my age. She’s bright and communicates well in class discussion, but her paper—frankly—was a mess. Great ideas, but she expressed them in overly pretentious language. One bloviated sentence was more than 60 words.
When I asked her why she did this, she said she wanted to “sound smart” by not using the same old words she normally uses. She worried that no one would take her seriously unless she adorned her ideas in the polysyllabic jargon of academia.

I THINK SERIES I savings bonds are a great place to stash money you’ll need to spend in five or six years, and yet I’ve resisted buying. I’ve seen credit cards that offer more cash back than the cards I currently carry, but I haven’t taken the bait. The reason: My goal is to have fewer financial accounts, not more, even if it means fewer dollars in my pocket.
As I discussed in an article earlier this year,

IT WAS JUNE 3, 2006, and I was in the starting lineup for the New York Yankees. We were in Baltimore, playing against the Orioles at Camden Yards. I went 1-for-4 in my major league debut.

A week later, I had the experience of a lifetime. June 10 was my first start at Yankee Stadium. It was a nationally broadcast Fox Saturday day game against the Oakland A’s. I hit my first major league home run.